Where to buy…
The Week reviews an exhibition in a private gallery Jeff Wall at White Cube Mason’s Yard
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall (b.1946) shot to global stardom and broke auction records creating huge, elaborately staged images that deliberately evoked the compositions and lustrous surfaces of Old Master paintings. His first show in Britain in nearly a decade brings together a selection of new and recent work, some of which marks a dramatic change from his signature style. The best of it plunges the viewer into the midst of dramatic actions and dares them to imagine the context: in one, set in a plush suburban living room, a middle-aged man reaches his hand out towards a seated woman in apparent consolation; unremarkable as that sounds, Wall loads it with Hitchcockian tension. Elsewhere, however, some unremarkable landscape pictures prompt a shrug, while a shot of a straining weightlifter could have come from the pages of a bodybuilding magazine. In short, a mixed but intriguing bag. Prices on request; they are likely to be high.
25-26 Masons Yard, London SW1 (020-7930 5373). Until 7 September.
Sacklers removed from Louvre
The Louvre in
Paris has become the first major cultural institution to remove the name
Sackler from its walls. Museums all over the world have come under pressure to cut their ties to the billionaire Sackler family, owing to its links to the painkiller at the heart of the US’s deadly opioid crisis. Two branches of the family control Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, which is facing multiple lawsuits for allegedly fuelling the opioid “epidemic”. Last week, the Louvre removed the sign to its Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities, and used tape to cover the name elsewhere. It said it was doing so because a 20-year limit on donor-names had expired, as the Sacklers’ $3.6m gift was made in 1996. However, it did not explain why the signs were only taken down now, not three years ago. Although many institutions are now rejecting Sackler donations, others that have already accepted them may not be able to remove the name without breaching donor agreements.